A person can walk into a gun store, he appears to be normal, he strikes up a conversation with the shop owner. The Shop owner has no idea if he has a mental illness or not. A week later the gun is used in a shooting.
This is not about the gun or where to get a gun, it's about it being very hard to tell whether someone is disturbed enough to be homicidal. Like that Elliot Rogers kid who suddenly snapped, who knows how long he was bottling up those emotions. I don't think mental health clinics or whatever they are called are doing enough.
What do you think can be done about this?
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No idea. I mean I guess we can blame a whole bunch of things, but in the end it comes down to awareness. Did other people know that this person was unstable, was outside help sought out, and was there a history of previous actions that led to the violent event. I would think that in many of these cases, there are plenty of warning signs before something happens, red flags that pop up which friends and family notice and either choose to do something or ignore it completely. Perhaps we should try talking about mental issues to children when they're young, so that if they start experiencing those issues, they can have an easier time talking about it rather than hiding it from the world and not getting help, sometimes leading to them acting out in a violent manner. I guess I think that early intervention is the best way to solve the problem, even though there will still be those individuals who continue to hide their issues until they reach adulthood, at least we will be discussing the problems out in the open rather than brushing them under the rug.